Olympic Coast, Moving and Alaska

As it turns out finding a house in Corvallis with a less than 1% vacancy rate is harder than we thought, even in June. But... after much searching and lots of second place applications, we found a place that we like, and Em will move in mid-July. With that off the to-do list, we headed up to the Olympic Coast to go backpacking.

New underwater cameras are fun...

Petroglyphs

We had great weather except for a rainy afternoon.

Cake rock.

We're back in Corvallis now, but tomorrow I'm leaving for my Adventure Treks trip in Alaska. I'll be back mid-August, but if you want to read the blog we send out to parents of students on my trip click here. Em will update about what she's doing this summer here later.

Outdoor School!

Westwind 2012 was great. Here are a few photos from the spring: Enjoying the Salmon river...

I taught the forest field study...

Em taught the estuary field study...

We found glass floats...

And there were pretty sunsets and nice people to work with.

Last 6 months, why are we moving so much?

Nearly 6 months have passed since the wedding and it feels like we've been busy. On the Monday afterwards, we didn't go on a honeymoon, instead we went back to work. I started working in produce at First Alternative Natural Foods Co-op and Em continued working at the OSU seed lab. I took a short trip backpacking on the PCT with Buckwheat and Dan in the North Cascades, and also climbed North Sister with Trevor.

Our roommates Chris and Cassandra had their baby, Loren, at the end of October. And living with an adorable newborn was pretty fun and exciting.

The real craziness began in November. Chris and Cass moved to Park City which was a real ordeal for them, with putting all their stuff in storage, hosting all of their relatives who flew out to see Loren, trying to find a house in Park City from Oregon, driving with all of their stuff to Utah in their tiny old car and all while doing an amazing job parenting for the first time. We decided to add to the craziness by moving too! We found a new place just outside of Corvallis, in the country and decided to try it out. So while working (Em working overtime) we moved out of our place on Elizabeth Dr. and into our new place out Oak Creek Dr.

The new place complete with jacuzzi tub, large fenced yard, outdoor shop, large kitchen and walk-in closet has been quite the experience in itself. It's heated mostly with a wood stove and during January warmth was a definite challenge. We spent a lot of time in the living room near the fire, and because we moved in November I had a lot of work to do cutting and splitting enough seasoned wood. It has been wonderful walking Laika on the numerous trails in MacDonald forest directly behind our house.

And Both Em and I have been bicycling to work every day and Em even got a fancy new bike for Christmas.

We've also had a few days of tandem riding to work when our schedules are similar.

At the end of January we flew out to Park City for a ski vacation, but mostly to visit Joel, Sonia, Sam, Chris, Cass and Loren. We skied thanks to free passes from Chris, free ski rentals from Joel and we also got free lodging at Chris and Cass's place. Park City is a pretty high-class place, especially when you go there the weekend of the Sundance Film Festival. We didn't see any movie stars but we did go see a film called Goats which we all enjoyed. We also watched a bobsled and skeleton race at the Olympic park which was pretty incredible. They go surprisingly fast, near 80mph! One of the maintenance crew let us watch a skeleton racer from right alongside the track. Takes two people to watch it...


Really though, getting to hang out with Loren (then 3 months old) was the highlight of the weekend.

You'd think after just moving into a place, we'd be pretty inclined to not move again for a while... Maybe it was the cold winter and our longing for spring weather, (even though our Park City trip was our only ski trip for the whole winter). Or maybe it was all our trips to the beach (almost every weekend in February and March)

Or maybe it was all the scary electrical work and wires that thoroughly wrapped the house or the fact that our landlord lived in our backyard. Whatever it was, we decided to move out of the house, move all of our stuff into a 10x10 storage unit (piano, bikes and all), quit our jobs and go to work together at Westwind. And we couldn't be happier about it.